05w47:1 Darren O'Donnell on kids in politics Posted November 23rd, 2005 by timothy. 0 Comments Good Reads Mailing List | 2005 week 47 number 1 (Darren O’Donnell on kids in politics) Thanks to Darren for allowing me to host his essay from the recently released uTOpia (Coach House Press) on Goodreads – Timothy ——————————————————————— Toronto the teenager: why we need a Children’s Council | Darren O’Donnell http://goodreads.ca/darrenodonnell/ “If you’re searching for utopia, you need look no further than the kids. The beautiful thing about focusing on youth is that while we may not be kids now, we all were once. And we carry the somatic memory of those days into almost every encounter; we all share, to some degree or other, a visceral understanding of powerlessness. Barring children from full political participation not only makes no sense when we consider the rights of the child, but also when we take into account the greater good. Excluding a huge segment of the population – a segment in the midst of forming views and attitudes that shape their behaviour for the rest of their lives – is a narrow-minded act that can only serve to limit our own possibilities as adults. So, while this proposal is for the children, it’s truly benefit of who those children become, for the adults who have to deal with results of eighteen years of their own political disenfranchisement.” —————————————- http://goodreads.timothycomeau.com To remove or add yourself to this list, go here emailed by Timothy on Wednesday 23 November 2005 @ 10:31 PM
05w46:1 Modern Times Posted November 15th, 2005 by timothy. 0 Comments Good Reads Mailing List | 2005 week 46 number 1 (modern times) ——————————————————————— We Now Live in a Fascist State | Lewis H. Lapham http://organicconsumers.org/Politics/harpers101205.cfm “We’re Americans; we have the money and the know-how to succeed where Hitler failed, and history has favored us with advantages not given to the early pioneers. We don’t have to burn any books. The Nazis in the 1930s were forced to waste precious time and money on the inoculation of the German citizenry, too well-educated for its own good, against the infections of impermissible thought. We can count it as a blessing that we don’t bear the burden of an educated citizenry. The systematic destruction of the public-school and library systems over the last thirty years, a program wisely carried out under administrations both Republican and Democratic, protects the market for the sale and distribution of the government’s propaganda posters. The publishing companies can print as many books as will guarantee their profit (books on any and all subjects, some of them even truthful), but to people who don’t know how to read or think, they do as little harm as snowflakes falling on a frozen pond. “ Writers and the Golden Age | Allan Massie http://www.literaryreview.co.uk/pulpit_nov_05.html “Of course, the idea that art necessarily finds expression in protest, or is essentially a means of protesting, whether from the Right or the Left, is itself, comparatively speaking, modern. It dates from the Romantic movement. Before then, much art was a celebration of the established order, and inasmuch as it was critical, the criticism was directed at those who would disturb that order. Satire, for instance, was generally conservative. Its anger and contempt were aroused by folly and the vanity and vices of the present day; the satirist harked back to a (doubtless imaginary) Golden Age. […] The Left, ever since Rousseau, has seen man as essentially good, in chains only on account of the institutions of a cruel and corrupt society. Loosen his chains, strike off his fetters, and the natural benevolence of his nature will be free to flourish. For the Left the Golden Age is still to come. The Right, however, sees our nature as essentially flawed. […]Left-wing artists, however angry, are optimists; right-wing ones, however serene or witty, are pessimists. Yet the same man may be of the Left in his politics, opinions, and daily life, but of the Right in his Art. Graham Greene is a good example: politically on the Left, nevertheless on the Right in the view of man’s nature which informs his novels.” What’s a Modern Girl to Do? | Maureen Dowd http://tinyurl.com/aany5 “‘What I find most disturbing about the 1950’s-ification and retrogression of women’s lives is that it has seeped into the corporate and social culture, where it can do real damage,’ she complains. ‘Otherwise intelligent men, who know women still earn less than men as a rule, say things like: ‘I’ll get the check. You only have girl money.” Throughout the long, dark ages of undisputed patriarchy, women connived to trade beauty and sex for affluence and status. In the first flush of feminism, women offered to pay half the check with ‘woman money’ as a way to show that these crass calculations – that a woman’s worth in society was determined by her looks, that she was an ornament up for sale to the highest bidder – no longer applied. Now dating etiquette has reverted. Young women no longer care about using the check to assert their equality. They care about using it to assess their sexuality. Going Dutch is an archaic feminist relic. Young women talk about it with disbelief and disdain. ‘It’s a scuzzy 70’s thing, like platform shoes on men,’ one told me.” —————————————- Long links made short by using TinyURL (http://www.tinyurl.com) To remove or add yourself to this list, go here http://goodreads.timothycomeau.com emailed by Timothy on Tuesday 15 November 2005 @ 11:17 PM
05w45:1 The 2005 Massey Lectures Posted November 7th, 2005 by timothy. 0 Comments Good Reads Mailing List | 2005 week 45 number 1 (The 2005 Massey Lectures) The 2005 Massey Lectures begin tonight on CBC Ideas. They can be heard online at 9pm EST from the CBC website’s stream, or via old fashioned radio boxes at 9pm local time across the country on CBC Radio 1. ——————————————————————— Race Against Time: The 2005 Massey Lectures | Stephen Lewis http://www.cbc.ca/ideas/massey/massey2005.html “‘I have spent the last four years watching people die.’ With these wrenching words, diplomat and humanitarian Stephen Lewis opens his 2005 Massey Lectures. Lewis’s determination to bear witness to the desperate plight of so many in Africa and elsewhere is balanced by his unique, personal, and often searing insider’s perspective on our ongoing failure to help. Lewis recounts how, in 2000, the United Nations Millennium Summit in New York introduced eight Millennium Development Goals, which focused on fundamental issues such as education, health, and cutting poverty in half by 2015. In audacious prose, alive with anecdotes ranging from maddening to hilarious to heartbreaking, Lewis shows why and how the international community is falling desperately short of these goals.” —————————————- http://goodreads.timothycomeau.com To remove or add yourself to this list, go here emailed by Timothy on Monday 07 November 2005 @ 4:55 PM
05w44:3 Aux Armes Citoyens! Posted November 2nd, 2005 by timothy. 0 Comments Good Reads Mailing List | 2005 week 44 number 3 (aux armes citoyens!) ——————————————————————— Six nights of riots in Paris ghetto split Chirac cabinet | Henry Samuel http://tinyurl.com/cx86n “The French government was reeling yesterday after six nights of rioting which have exposed a split in the cabinet over how to deal with poverty and immigration in the dilapidated Paris suburbs. As authorities cleaned up the debris of another bout of violence, including the wrecks of 250 cars burned out on Tuesday night, both the prime minister, Dominique de Villepin, and the interior minister, Nicolas Sarkozy, put off foreign trips to deal with the rioting. ‘We sure showed it to them last night,’ said one youth in Clichy-sous-Bois, a grim suburb of high-rises some 15 miles outside Paris.” The Barbarians at the Gates of Paris | Theodore Dalrymple http://www.city-journal.org/html/12_4_the_barbarians.html “Where does the increase in crime come from? The geographical answer: from the public housing projects that encircle and increasingly besiege every French city or town of any size, Paris especially. In these housing projects lives an immigrant population numbering several million, from North and West Africa mostly, along with their French-born descendants and a smattering of the least successful members of the French working class. From these projects, the excellence of the French public transport system ensures that the most fashionable arrondissements are within easy reach of the most inveterate thief and vandal. Architecturally, the housing projects sprang from the ideas of Le Corbusier, the Swiss totalitarian architect—and still the untouchable hero of architectural education in France—who believed that a house was a machine for living in, that areas of cities should be entirely separated from one another by their function, and that the straight line and the right angle held the key to wisdom, virtue, beauty, and efficiency. “NOTE: article date August 2002 Neither whores nor submissives | Rebecca Hillauer http://www.signandsight.com/features/288.html “Young Muslim women in the working class suburbs of France have two choices: slut or servant. Fadela Amara is trying to offer them a third option: respect. Fadela Amara has a mission. One sees it in the intensity of her eyes and feels it in the passion of her speech. A good two years ago, the daughter of an Algerian immigrant family in Paris, she founded the organisation ‘Ni putes ni soumises’. This is also the title of her book, which won the ‘Prix du Livre Politique’ of the French national assembly last year. In the book, Fadela Amara tells in a simple and direct style the story of her fight against the growing violence and social disintegration in France’s suburbs.” —————————————- Long links made short by using TinyURL (http://www.tinyurl.com) To remove or add yourself to this list, go here http://goodreads.timothycomeau.com emailed by Timothy on Wednesday 02 November 2005 @ 11:03 PM
05w44:2 Aliens Posted November 1st, 2005 by timothy. 0 Comments Good Reads Mailing List | 2005 week 44 number 2 (aliens) ——————————————————————— Explaining Those Vivid Memories of Martian Kidnappers | Benedict Carey http://tinyurl.com/93yqb “Dr. Clancy’s accounting for abduction memories starts with an odd but not uncommon experience called sleep paralysis. While in light dream-rich REM sleep, people will in rare cases wake up for a few moments and find themselves unable to move. Psychologists estimate that about a fifth of people will have that experience at least once, during which some 5 percent will be bathed in terrifying sensations like buzzing, full-body electrical quivers, a feeling of levitation, at times accompanied by hallucinations of intruders.” Are UFO Alien Faces an Inborn Facial Recognition Template? | Frederick V. Malmstrom http://www.skeptic.com/the_magazine/featured_articles/alien_faces.html “The Descriptions of alien faces historically reported by UFO abductees are almost boringly uniform. Long before “close encounters†became a catchword in the ufologist’s vocabulary, self-proclaimed UFO abductees described their abductors as bulbous-headed humanoids equipped with oversized, wraparound eyes, vertical double-slit nostrils and gray skin. Is there another explanation for this uniformity of features besides the most obvious — that it is a description of an actual alien race?” —————————————- Long links made short by using TinyURL (http://www.tinyurl.com) To remove or add yourself to this list, go here http://goodreads.timothycomeau.com emailed by Timothy on Tuesday 01 November 2005 @ 7:22 PM
